SIDE ADVENTURE: THE HORSE GOD’S REQUEST

According to the Horse God Malanya, the Upheaval may have introduced five new kinds of horses to Hyrule. However, these breeds are unknown to Malanya, and not yet under their protection. They have infused magic stones with their essence. They have asked you to find the new horses and feed them the stones, so that they may bring their new children under their protection.

You have 5 horse breeds left to find.

To nobody’s surprise, the Hebra Sky was freezing. This particular island was firmly above the clouds, and so it did not have the thick layer of snow that covered the islands at lower altitudes. Nevertheless, a thin sheet of black ice had formed upon the ground, spreading out from the island’s central lake, making it precarious to move. The sparse yellow sky grass that stubbornly clung to the rock was covered in frost, as was the tree that had somehow managed to grow in the middle of the frozen lake. It had to be some kind of evergreen, but with its sprawling roots and heart-shaped, light blue leaves, it was certainly not any kind that grew on the surface. Icicles hung from it as ornaments.

Link snapped a picture, hoping to show it to Zelda whenever she found her. Or when she returned on her own; the few dragon tears she’d gathered on the way to Hebra had made it very obvious how unlikely it was for Link to simply find her. Link was capable of a lot of things, but time travel was not one of them. If anyone could invent a time machine, though — it’d probably be Purah, then Robbie, but Zelda was a good third. Link had faith in her. So she made sure to document all the strange new animals and plants she discovered, so that Zelda could make sense of them when she got back.

Which meant that when some kind of weird bird showed up in the distance, she was too busy fumbling with the camera app to pay attention to its descent. It landed and Link jolted, head snapping up and away from the Purah Pad. What had startled her had been the telltale sound of horse hooves running along stone, Link’s very favourite noise in the whole world, completely out of place in the sky. After all, there was no way a horse could get up here, not unless they had wings or something.

Link stared, and a horse with wings stared back.

A blink, a second look, and yes, it was definitely a horse. A somewhat strange horse, but undeniably a horse. Or a pony, just barely tall enough for Link to ride, fat and sturdy. The wings drew her attention first, of course. Very large, large enough that they almost dragged across the ground when folded at its side, covered with feathers. The feathers reminded her of the Rito’s: strong and long, with a thick layer of down below the flight feathers. They were a gentle brown, dappled with small, white specks, like the thinnest layer of snow. Its coat was a matching, creamy brown, its manes and tail pure white. Both were lightly curled, but that was barely worth mentioning compared to the curls in its coat. Thick and fluffy, almost like a sheep’s, no doubt insulating it against the cold. Link wondered how it would feel. It looked soft.

When Link wondered about something, she explored it. So, careful not to spook the horse, she approached it from the side, clearly in its line of sight. It turned its ears toward her, listening, but it seemed calm, unthreatened, even a little curious. Its ears were longer than a normal horse’s but shorter than a donkey’s, adorably tufted with fluffy brown fur. Link wanted to touch it so badly.

Unlike its grounded counterpart, the winged horse did not run when she approached. Seeing how calm it was, Link couldn’t help but push her luck. She pulled out some apple slices and offered one on the palm of her hand, holding her breath. The horse sniffed, moved a little closer, sniffed again, then carefully ate a single slice. Immediately, its ears flew forward, and it pushed its nose against Link’s other hand, trying to dig the rest of the slices out of it. Link gladly obliged. While the horse was munching on the apple, Link took the opportunity to pet it coat. It was soft, soft and thick enough to sink your hand into. Her first impression had been right; the hair was more akin to a sheep’s than a horse, but only if a sheep were as as soft as a plushie.

And because no-one had ever accused Link of having self control, she jumped onto the horse’s back. It did not buck; it took a few nervous steps, but Link pet its neck and made soothing noises, and that calmed it down. Link sat a little further down its back than she normally would, the wings at the shoulder crowding her out. To hold onto its manes she had to lean over, in a pose that would be sure to give her back pain in a few decades. That would be worth it, though. Grandma Link would regale the village children with tales of her flying horse and would never regret this for a second.

She spurred it on, and the horse took flight.

Link had flown before, or at least glided, been carried by Rito. This was different from both. It was as riding a horse, only the rhythm off the hooves had been replaced by the rhythm of the wings; just as calming, just as secure, just as comfortable. Not for a second was Link scared, not even the battle kind of scared, when her veins hummed with the pleasant thrill of danger. She looked down at the ground below, Hebra’s wave of mountain peaks, the pinprick of Rito Village in the distance, and thought I can’t wait to show Zelda.

Surprisingly, the horse followed her commands well. She steered toward Snowfield Stable, carefully avoided the nearby gleeok, and struck down in a gallop to a chorus of surprised cries. Link jumped off the horse’s back, fished out another few apple slices, and remembered Malanya’s request. A new breed of horse? Well, winged certainly qualified.

Link nestled the magic stone among the apple slices, and the horse at it without a second thought. There was a chime as she swallowed, the first notes of a flute’s song. Malanya’s approval, surely.

“Would you, uh —” the stablemaster stuttered, “like to register that?”

Link grinned and nodded her head. She’d name it Curly.

Brightblooms were a lifesaver. Quite literally. Without them Link absolutely would not have seen the writhing mass of bloody flesh rising from the water, and would’ve gotten her head bitten off. As it was she saw something red from the corner of her eye, reared back, went for a yet-unfused dagger, and barely fended off the newest monster.

The Depths had been full of those. Monsters or monstrous animals, the only way Link could distinguish them was with hostility. Zelda would’ve been scandalized, but Link did not think it mattered much whether the swarming oversized maggots were or were not technically magical, as long as they were trying to eat her.

This monster ducked under the water and Link darted back from the edge. She kept her eyes on the water as she drew a bow and aimed, ready to snipe whatever broke the surface. There was perhaps half a minute of silence before the water began to ripple and Link lost the arrow.

It was a perfect hit, lodged straight inside the creature’s chest. And that is exactly where it stayed, arrowhead buried deep in the flesh, the shaft standing straight as the monster hauled itself out of the water, completely unbothered.

Bit of an issue.

Link nocked another arrow, already trying to decide on the most effective fusion, then froze. The monster had climbed properly onto shore and was now fully visible within the brightbloom’s light.

It was a horse. A parody of one at least, standing too tall on ghost-thin legs, but that hardly registered through the grotesque sight of its bare flesh and pulsing veins. It was as if someone had skinned the poor creature and it’d hung on to life, all its muscles and arteries completely exposed, its mouth all teeth and no lips. Its... skin — if you could call it that — bled slowly but steadily, not from the arrow wound, but all of it; it bled like a normal horse would sweat, coating its whole body in a thin layer of blood, leaving a red trail in the water it’d risen from.

And it was hungry.

It lunged at Link, and though she managed to avoid its attack, she missed her arrow. She was about to fuse a bomb with another arrow when she suddenly remembered: Malanya was searching for new horse breeds.

Distracted, she’d let the arrow fly without fusing, and it hit the creature in its neck. It made a horrid, ear-rending sound of pain, high and shrill and unmistakably a horse’s neigh.

She was supposed to feed this creature a stone.

It turned its bleeding, hollow eye sockets toward her, scraped its mangled hoofs against the ground and snaped its teeth.

...This was going to be a pain.

In the end, Link led the monster horse in circles for about half an hour, before she managed to dupe it into eating the stone by coating it with her own blood. As it ate it moved its tail stump the same way a normal horse might and made a familiar sound of contentment. The same melody rose as when Curly had eaten the stone, and Link decided she was very, very happy not to be a god.

Link went down into the Depths to gather a few pieces of zonaite, and then she blinked and spent several days down under. Probably. With no daylight and no dragons passing by, she kept time by her hunger and sleep. When she bothered to keep time at all, that is, which mostly did not occur to her. So who knew how long she’d really been down here. Too long, definitely.

After spending long enough in the Depths, you forgot the darkness had ever been strange. You could go for days without encountering a Light Root, and brightbloom seeds ran dry eventually. Tiny pinpricks of light shot through the dark, glowing insects and animals lighting up like beacons. Chasing them was rarely a good idea. Here in the Depths, it seemed nature had weaponized the natural yearning for light, and any moth attracted to the flame would be quickly snapped up and eaten.

So of course Link never failed to chase the lights. She had a sword and loved to use it.

She must’ve strayed half a province away from her original point of entry, since the landscape had changed from lava to wetland. Her boots were sopping wet, and the splashing of her footsteps echoed through the quiet. Every so often plants of some kind would brush against her legs, but Link could barely make out their general forms, let alone their colours. She had not found a Light Root yet and though her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to see what was directly in front of her, it was impossible to see much more than that.

Except in the distance, there were a million pinpricks of light. A small cluster of stars close to the ground, their patterns shifting and sliding in a flickering display of bright blue. A lighthouse and a lure. Either this was a group of smaller animals, or it was a singular large monster. Uncertainty bred curiosity — the loveliest feeling in the whole wide world — and so Link moved toward it, eager to find out which it was.

A silent approach was impossible. She tried her best with potions, but the water made it impossible to properly dampen her footsteps. The lights did not move toward her, as a monster would, which meant they probably belonged to animals. Many creatures in the Depths were remarkably tame for wild animals, entirely unafraid and often even curious of Link. The only humans that had been down here in centuries must’ve been the Yiga, who were spread thinly enough that most animals would’ve never have encountered them. They’d never learned to fear the hunters and so did not know to run from Link. Honestly, it was a little disquieting.

As Link got closer, the lights became vague silhouettes, an outline of something strangely familiar. She could not quite place it —

She could. They were horses.

Thin, lanky horses, those with features so delicate they seemed almost breakable, the kind of horses fancy people liked. They stood a few hands taller than Link, grazing on the little plants growing amid the underground wetland, unbothered by her presence. Their coats must’ve been black; if it hadn’t been for the lights, they would have been entirely invisible amid the darkness of the depths.

But they did have lights, a cacophony of small glowing spots, their reflections dancing on the water. Every horse’s pattern was different and they were not stagnant, either. One of the horses raised its head to look at Link and its patterns shifted. Light that had been clustered at its back rained down across the sides, all the way down to the hooves, its steady glow quickly turning to erratic twinkling. It had spots beneath its eyes, or Link thought it did, since two bright blue lights shone from roughly the place where its eyes would probably be. It was too far to see those properly.

Remembering Malanya’s request, Link pulled one of their magic stones from the Purah Pad, considered it for a second, then shrugged and gently threw it in the direction of the staring horse. It came closer, its lights now bright enough to make out its figure: surprisingly short tail, ruler-straight manes, and pure black eyes, devoid even of an iris. It sniffed the stone, and took it into its mouth. As it did so, it revealed teeth much, much larger than the average horse. Maybe it needed stronger teeth to eat tougher plants. It swallowed the stone and Malanya’s melody played sweetly across the wetland, erasing any doubt.

These were horses. Fairly regular ones at that, nothing like the grotesque beast made of flesh and veins that she’d met in the Cresia Pit Mines or even the strange flying Curly. The only real difference between these horses and the ones up top were the lights and their teeth. She could definitely ride these.

She approached them as she would any other horse: slowly, quietly, and then with the speed of an arrow. It did not take long before she had the horse with eye spots tamed. Link patted its neck, gave it scritches along its mane, and was feeling quite good about herself. She was not paying attention.

One of the horses stuck its head up, tilted its ears, then let out some kind of distinctly un-horse-like, high-pitched cry. The lights went out at once, and the herd ran.

They were faster than surface horses, not by much, but by enough that Link had to cling to the manes to stay seated. At first, that was; she got used to the rhythm of their gallop soon enough. Though the lights on the horses’ coats had gone out, the Depths were strangely bright. Perhaps whatever monster or predator was chasing them produced its own light. Careful to keep her balance, Link shifted to look over her shoulder, to try and see what they were running from.

In the herd’s wake ran a trail of light, the blue of their coats planted in the swamp waters. The glow did not start as soon as their hooves hit the ground. No, the hoofprints only lit up once the horses were several lengths ahead. A defense mechanism. That’s what the lights were: a means to confuse a predator after they ran.

But Link could not see a predator. Not immediately, at least. She squinted, tried to hold her gaze as steady as possible on a galloping horse, and still she saw nothing but the Depth’s black walls.

And then she realized the wall moved. It moved as if it were made of a thousand grains of sand, a crawling mess barely maintaining formation. It made no sound, not a whisper, so it did not click for Link, not until one of the little black grains tried to land on a nearby horse, only to be batted away by the tail.

Flies. They were flies. Depths flies, aggressive as locusts. Their flight led them through a small pool of glowfish, wholly swallowed by their dark. The swarm did not fall for the horses’ defense mechanism; they ignored the lights and pursued them, inching closer, closer, ever closer.

Link had an educated guess as to what their diet was, and could think of few ways worse to die than to be eaten alive by flies. Not that this was how she’d die. Come on. She pulled out her bow, knocked an arrow, prepared a bomb flower to fuse, then thought the better of it. Herd of horses, right. She switched to a fire fruit and lost the arrow. Even on fire, the flies made no sound.

It took almost her whole quiver, but eventually, the swarm burnt out. Slowly, the herd came to a halt. Some horses scraped their hooves, nervously flicked their ears and flared their nostrils. The braver ones dared to walk in a small group to the ashy remains of the flies for inspection.

Link’s own horse took a restless step forward, then immediately back. Link scritched her mane and made a hushing noise, and the horse calmed down, just a bit. Slowly, the herd followed its example. The lights returned, a constellation lighting up star by star, with Link in its middle. She wanted to get off, to see if her own horse’s cute little glowing eye spots had returned, but not before she registered it good and proper.

That was, of course, when she remembered the stables did not exactly operate below ground.

...Perhaps she could convince Kilton to open a new business.

Deep ravines ran through the Gerudo Desert Depths, carving up the ground like roast meat. This in itself did not catch Link’s attention. Ravines existed, just as mountains. Just because the ground above was flat desert land didn’t mean the depths below had to be.

Besides, the constant, deafening sound of thunder echoing through the region monopolized all attention.

By all rights there should be no thunder. There was no weather in the Depths, how could there be? And yet there was thunderclap after thunderclap, a constant banging of the world’s largest drum, loud enough to make the ground shake and her bones ring, make her feel as if her skin was about to be ripped off. It bounced off the walls and ceiling, and endless loop of ear-splitting echoes clashing with each other. First time she had descended, Link could barely stand to be there for all of twenty seconds before desperately warping out, dry heaving and shaking.

There wouldn’t have been a second time if she hadn’t brought the problem to Joshua. Her eyes had lit up and she’d immediately launched into an excited ramble about the possibilities this posed, the mystery of it all, pleading and demanding Link to go down and find the source of the noise, not unlike the kids in Kakariko pleaded with Link to play with them. Then she’d made him some fort of high-tech noise reducing cloak within a day and a half or so, giving it to her in return for a promise of information.

The cloak was a discomforting mix of upsetting and peaceful. It seemed completely normal, a simple traveller’s cloak with hood, but when she flipped the hood up all sound disappeared. ‘Reducing’ was putting it lightly; with the hood up, she could scarcely hear herself breath. She could not hear monsters or friends approaching, could not hear people working and talking in the background, the birds and insects singing. All the banal buzzing of life had suddenly been snuffed out. First time she put it on she’d teared up, had to hurry out of Joshua’s study and into the well to cry. A constant tension in her body had disappeared along with the noise. She hadn’t even realized she’d been in pain until that point, and now it was gone. It was miraculous, a gift sent by the Hylia. Contrary to popular belief Link was not especially devout, found it strange to worship someone who sounded quite human when she spoke to her, but this? This made her pray.

It was upsetting because it made it really, really easy to isolate herself, to forget the world existed, that people were real. This was not something innate to the silence; the townsfolk and travellers she’d met who could not hear never seemed to have this problem, talked among themselves and with others just as happily and enthusiastically as the hearing. No, this was all her. That thing that made her spend days or even weeks in caves, mountains, islands, depths, forests or even just fields loved the silence too much. People were things that only existed when she was looking at them, when she could hear them. If she let herself she would disappear into the cracks and crevices of the wild, to become nothing more than a whispered myth. She wouldn’t, of course: it would make her friends sad. But this was something she had to remind herself of, day after day, hour after hour: you are a person. You live in a people world. You cannot allow yourself to leave it.

So all in all, she thanked Joshua and used the hood in moderation.

The ground still shook in the Gerudo Depths, but the hood successfully blocked out the sound. It allowed Link to explore, even though she had to be bit careful where she walked, the ground unsteady as it was. She could probably create a Zonai device to hover off the ground and transport her, but she preferred exploration on foot. The technology was too impersonal.

To get back on topic: the ravines. Normal. Ordinary. Nothing to worry about. Except for the part that they grew.

She wasn’t sure at first, not at all, but bit by bit by bit, it became impossible to deny. The Purah Pad showed the new grooves in the earth, extra little lines where before there’d been nothing. Not to mention the destroyed Light Roots she encountered, half or more of them gone. There was not even any debris nearby. Just a ravine and a Light Root at its border, ending abruptly, edges strangely rounded.

Something was carving up the land. Something living, something massive, and something Link had somehow managed to miss entirely. Something that evaded her for weeks after she started searching. She wished she could explain how, but she had no answer. When she finally found the thing, it was entirely by accident.

The ground began to shake; not the fine trembling that accompanied the distant thunder, but a type of shaking more akin to an earthquake. Link could barely keep herself standing, holding onto a stray zonaite deposit for balance. That too shook beneath her fingers, finely at first, then harsher, more aggressively. The earthquake was getting closer. Far in the distance, barely close enough for Link to see, the ground was splitting apart.

And a head rose to take a bite.

It was a horse, in the absolute, loosest sense of the word. Like the skinned monster horse from the water, this creature was only recognizeable as a ‘horse’ thanks to basic anatomical resemblance. Hooves, legs, body, neck, leg, head. But it was even less a horse than that beast had been. At least that bloodied thing had been a beast. This? This could not be.

It was gigantic. Larger than any structure she’d ever seen — save perhaps those strange stone towers rising up from the floor of the Depths all the way to its ceiling — it tread forward, lifting its enormous legs slowly, oh so slowly, heavy as they must be. It was made of deep black stone, faintly glittering beneath the glow of the distant Light Root. Deep gem deposits dappled its back, sea blue sapphire, blazing rubies, even a few pure white spots of diamonds. Two large, round, brilliant emerald green clusters sat in its head, where the eyes might’ve been. That head, which alone was probably the size of Gerudo Town, carved the way: it opened its mouth and bit straight through the rock, the very ground itself. Behind it trailed a chasm, one of the distinctive ravines of the region.

Link was not easily shocked. She had seen wonders upon wonders, horrors as well; the very first thing she’d ever seen were the lights of an ancient machine that healed a body from death, and the first thing she’d heard was her name being spoken by the disembodied voice of a princess locked in a century-long battle with pure evil. Link had a high tolerance for strangeness.

This, though? This was like the first time she’d seen the dragons. She barely registered standing, barely registered her body at all beneath the haze of amazement. She watched with open mouth as the monolith of a horse came closer, closer, split the earth apart and chewed it as grass. Could this really be one of Malanya’s children? Just another type of horse? Surely not. Surely.

She threw Malanya’s stone in the creature’s path, backed up so that it would not swallow her, and listened incredulously to the sweet song the god sang as it was swallowed. A horse. How could this possibly be a horse?

Slowly, the horse made its way forward, to who knows where, out of Link’s sight.

She’d completely forgotten to take a picture for Joshua.

Reports of a strange new dragon had led Link to the Eldin Sky Archipelago, hoping that it could perhaps be the Light Dragon or — no. The Light Dragon.

(She’d gathered all the tears, she’d seen how the Light Dragon had come to be, but every time she lingered on it her blood boiled so hot it nearly burned away her skin because how dare she, how dare she do this again — had Link not explained, over and over and over and over and over again that this gods damned suicidal enthusiasm for sacrifice hurt them? Had Link been talking to a statue, had the last five years not meant anything to her —)

So, the Light Dragon might have possibly been spotted near the Eldin Sky. Link had been trying to chart the Light Dragon’s flight path, a task easier said then done when your flying machines kept running out of battery and your horses couldn’t keep up. She’d gotten better at catching dragons, but ‘better’ did not mean ‘good’, and if she ever wanted to get the Master Sword bac, she had to actually, unfortunately, plan. Hence, charting flight paths.

Though, the longer she explored the sky islands, the more she became convinced that this was a dead end. Dawn was starting to break, the early morning pink gently touching the clouds, and that meant that Link had been there for almost a full day. If she hadn’t seen the Light Dragon yet, odds were she wasn’t going to. She began to stand up, stretch, ready herself for a dive —

Which was, of course, exactly when she a flicker of dragon scales from the corner of her eye.

It was strange, though. No winds began to blow; the air stayed still, no electric sparks, no heavy smoke, no freezing gale, no sickly sweet silent princess smell. Dragons announced their presence well before you could see them. And yet, that flash of light had been a dragon scale for sure, Link would know, she’d once spent three full days on Farosh’s back farming her scales. The telltale glow was most similar to that of a fairy, or the statues of Hylia when they spoke. Though she’d tried, Link could never quite describe the difference between statue and sunlight, fairy and stars, but it was there: a light so removed from this world it seemed to be borrowed from another, a mirage or a dream. It was unmistakable.

Behind her was a splash, a rustling sound. Link tensed; it was the rustling of scaly aerocuda wings. Hand already moving to her bow, Link turned around and —

Saw the dragon. Horse?

Four legged, with hooves and manes and a tail, about as tall as you could expect from a warmblood horse, but that was where the similarities ended. The proportions were wrong, the legs too short, the body and neck too long; instead of fur, it was covered in shimmering dragon scales, a rich red and a glitter gloss of blue, shining in the sunlight. Its manes and tail were a matching deep blue, the hooves so red they almost seemed to bleed. And of course, it had wings; wings as large as Link herself, scaly as an earocuda’s, folded similarly to its side as it drank from the pool it was standing on. Perhaps it might simply be a new type of winged horse, except Curly had never been able to walk on water. Could a dragon do so? Or was this creature different? Not quite dragon, not quite horse, but some divine mixture of the two?

Either way, it was probably horse enough for Malanya, if that giant in the Depths had been.

Slowly, careful not to spook the dragon-horse, Link inched closer to the pool. It watched her with slit yellow eyes, and Link was oddly reminded of neither a horse nor a dragon, but the cat that liked to hang around her house. The horse-dragon looked at her much the same; with keen attention, surprising intelligence, and the self-importance of a royal. I see you, I know you, I judge you.

When Link held out Malanya’s stone it ate without hesitating, its lips hot as the sun.

QUEST COMPLETE

You found all new horse breeds! You even got some horses out of it yourself. Malanya and their children thank you.